Petty felons get prison too often

Saturday

Mar 29, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 29, 2008 at 11:05 AM

After reading Nancy Elliott's Feb. 22 letter suggesting that I had complained about prison populations being swollen due to maximum sentences for dangerous criminals, I was forced to go back to the original Dispatch article ("Life terms pile up for rapists," Feb. 11) to see if I said such a thing. After all, prison bed space is indeed designed for taking the dangerous criminal off the street for long periods of time. Why on earth would I make such a comment? Now, having refreshed my recollection, 1 realize that I did not "conveniently forget" that "cruel, merciless and unrepentant" criminals should be incarcerated, as suggested by Elliott.

After reading Nancy Elliott's Feb. 22 letter suggesting that I had complained about prison populations being swollen due to maximum sentences for dangerous criminals, I was forced to go back to the original Dispatch article ("Life terms pile up for rapists," Feb. 11) to see if I said such a thing. After all, prison bed space is indeed designed for taking the dangerous criminal off the street for long periods of time. Why on earth would I make such a comment? Now, having refreshed my recollection, 1 realize that I did not "conveniently forget" that "cruel, merciless and unrepentant" criminals should be incarcerated, as suggested by Elliott.

Although the entire interview was not published, what I said and what reasonable readers would understand from the part quoted was that the General Assembly has passed laws that put far too many petty felons in prison -- people who, to paraphrase Elliott, are not cruel, who do have mercy and who are repentant -- thus limiting the beds available for the deserving. If Elliott would take the time to look beyond her vicarious pain and into the current demographic of the Ohio prison population, she would discover that the majority -- indeed, the substantial majority -- of prisoners are minor and petty offenders. Low-level drug offenders or folks sentenced for petty property offenses doing minimum or near-minimum sentences have swollen the prison population. These prisoners constitute the majority of the prison population. They should not.

Of course, the General Assembly is not the only political body responsible for this situation. There are local options that can be used by the sentencing judges, who often listen more closely to the local prosecutor than the attorney representing the defendant. But community-based correctional facilities and county jails cost the local community money to build and maintain. Sending a minor offender to prison is free, from the county perspective. That makes the decision easy, particularly for judges in smaller, less populated counties. While this practice makes the local politicians popular (or keeps them from becoming unpopular) with the voters who elect them, it effectively shifts what is a local community responsibility to the state, and it creates the prison-overcrowding problem that I was commenting on, Elliott's accusation to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers suggested a way to correct this problem during the run-up to Senate Bill 2, the last major sentencing reform that led to the current "truth-in-sentencing law." It was suggested that the General Assembly create a "hard ceiling" on the prison population and apportion prison bed space to the counties based on population and urbanization factors. Space for 40,000 to 50,000 state prisoners is all Ohio should need for the next 100 years; the population of this state is declining. On a proportional basis, 40,000 prisoners is a higher percentage than the Soviet Union imprisoned at the height of the Evil Empire. And the Ohio prison population is projected to reach 70,000 inmates by 2017.

Under the criminal-defense lawyers' proposal, counties could trade bed spaces as corporations trade pollution credits among one another. This would force the local politicians to choose which criminals they foist upon the state. There would be no limit to how many people could be imprisoned, just that once the county has used up its prison-bed space allotment, the county would have to either pay to house the additional prisoners locally or buy bed space from another county. In other words, no more free lunch at state taxpayers' expense.

This proposal never saw the light of day with the Sentencing Commission, which was and to this day remains dominated by prosecutors and law-enforcement special-interest groups whose obvious prejudice is exactly opposite of a local-responsibility-in-sentencing law. The political fact of life is that it's easier to spin all the blame for a state prison riot on the evil folks who are locked up than it is to address prison overcrowding. By the way, does anyone remember the last prison building program in Ohio? It was the most expensive building program of its kind in state history, and it has made Ohio a leader in the prison industrial complex. Does anyone remember the criminal-defense bar warning that we cannot build our way out of the overcrowding problem? Prison population always increases to and past maximum capacity without regard to the rate of crime, which, by the way, has been flat or dropping for the past 25 years in a state where the overall population also has been flat or declining.

My guess is that no one does remember or that no one cares -- certainly not Elliott. We just keep taking money from the schools, thereby ensuring that we will have a continuing source of minor felons to fill up spaces that should be reserved for the serious criminals whose crimes so torture her. Apparently, it is better to rage against the storm as King Lear did than it is to come in out of the rain.

For my part, I think it a far better thing to limit the amount of money we spend at the expense of all taxpayers to imprison those who commit crimes in the local community and maximize the amount of money we spend at the expense of all taxpayers to educate children, thereby helping to keep them from committing crimes in the local community. I would prefer for Ohio to be a leader in the education industrial complex. But that is just the opinion of a criminal defense lawyer and, therefore, easily ignored.

HARRY R. REINHART Columbus

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